Nicky Holland Sense And Sensuality (2017

The second solo album from Nicky Holland which was fated to go the same way as the first and possibly the reason why she never planned another. Nicky recorded a version of "I just don't know what to do with myself" for the film "My Best Friend's Wedding" while Cyndi Lauper had some success with her song "Hatful Of Stars". In a whole it's a collection of gorgeous orchestral pop, criminally underrated and undersold. At its best, it's even better than its jazzy predecessor.

Nicky Holland's "debut" album - titled, uncannily, "Nicky Holland" - is her first, but it comes after 10 years of working on virtually everybody else's. Holland is among pop's most flexible hired hands. Tears for Fears, Lloyd Cole, Cyndi Lauper, Oleta Adams, Ryuichi Sakamoto… they've all called her in to arrange strings, or assist with a tune, or sing backing vocals, or set up orchestral parts, or play some piano. She's an all-purpose musical troubleshooter. If you're David Byrne, and you need some folk songs from the Bahamas transcribed, then Nicky Holland is your woman.

With 2016 having marked the 25th anniversary of Nicky Holland (her solo debut, released June 1991) and 2017 occasioning the 20th anniversary of Sense and Sensuality (released June 1997), singer/songwriter/pianist/composer/arranger Nicky Holland (whose resume includes Tears For Fears, Fun Boy Three and creating scores for John Hughes films) sensed that now was “an appropriate time to re-evaluate” those albums and assemble Nobody’s Girl, the definitive retrospective of her solo work as a recording artist for Epic Records.